ABSTRACT
This chapter briefs recap of the Hesburgh report and Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) on account of how people understand the immigration reform effort during the early 1980s as focused on policing bodies rather than simply borders. It seeks to close the gap between what people see as competing geopolitical and biopolitical analyses of US immigration control policy. The chapter argues that topography and topology, as well as geopolitics and biopolitics, should not be read as opposed and antithetical 'rule sets' for modeling how borders work, and why. It explores this question theoretically, with reference to the split between topographical and topological research on borders, but also empirically in terms of the United States (US)-Mexico case study, which shows that US immigration control leans heavily on both geopolitical and biopolitical, or topographical and topological, borders. Moreover, the increased reliance on enforcement of topological borders in the current era depends crucially upon the continued enforcement and escalating militarization of the topographical border.
